These bacteria quotes will inspire you. Bacteria are microscopic, single-celled organisms that exist in their millions, in every environment, both inside and outside other organisms.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging bacteria quotes, bacteria sayings, and bacteria proverbs.
Best Bacteria Quotes
- “It seems now clear that a belief in the functional importance of all enzymes found in bacteria is possible only to those richly endowed with Faith.” ~ Marjory Stephenson
- “To declare war on ninety-nine percent of bacteria when less than percent of them threaten our health makes no sense. Many of the bacteria we’re killing are our protectors.” ~ Sandor Katz
- “Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.” ~ Gore Vidal
- “What you see is that the most outstanding feature of life’s history is a constant domination by bacteria.” ~ Stephen Jay Gould
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“If you don’t like bacteria, you’re on the wrong planet.” ~ Stewart Brand
- “Because we humans are big and clever enough to produce and utilize antibiotics and disinfectants, it is easy to convince ourselves that we have banished bacteria to the fringes of existence. Don’t you believe it. Bacteria may not build cities or have interesting social lives, but they will be here when the Sun explodes. This is their planet, and we are on it only because they allow us to be.” ~ Bill Bryson
- “The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music.” ~ Lewis Thomas
- “We are all of us walking communities of bacteria.
The world shimmers, a pointillist landscape
made of tiny living beings.” ~ Lynn Margulis - “With one linear centimeter of your lower colon there lives and works more bacteria (about 100 billion) that all humans who have ever been born. Yet many people continue to assert that it is we who are in charge of the world” ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson
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“Support bacteria – they’re the only culture some people have.” ~ Steven Wright
- “You are one miniscule piece of a never-ending cycle. In fact, you’re not even a piece. You’re just a holder for billions and billions of other pieces. Whether that’s organic components, living organisms inside your body, bacteria or whatever it is, you’re just part of the soup of the universe, so just try to enjoy what’s good about it.” ~ Joe Rogan
- “For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “Lots of people think, well, we’re humans; we’re the most intelligent and accomplished species; we’re in charge. Bacteria may have a different outlook: more bacteria live and work in one linear centimeter of your lower colon than all the humans who have ever lived. That’s what’s going on in your digestive tract right now. Are we in charge, or are we simply hosts for bacteria? It all depends on your outlook.” ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson
- “The 4th sort of creatures… which moved through the 3 former sorts, were incredibly small, and so small in my eye that I judged, that if 100 of them lay [stretched out] one by another, they would not equal the length of a grain of course Sand; and according to this estimate, ten hundred thousand of them could not equal the dimensions of a grain of such course Sand. There was discover’d by me a fifth sort, which had near the thickness of the former, but they were almost twice as long.
The first time bacteria were observed.” ~ Antonie van Leeuwenhoek -
“Bacteria: The only culture some people have.” ~ Hesiod
- “If an alien visited Earth, they would take some note of humans, but probably spend most of their time trying to understand the dominant form of life on our planet – microorganisms like bacteria and viruses.” ~ Nathan Wolfe
- “The world powers established this filthy bacteria, the Zionist regime, which is lashing out at the nations in the region like a wild beast.” ~ Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
- “Harmful bacteria, viruses, calcium-forming micro-organisms, and candida are part of our world. Unfortunately, so are toxic chemicals, including everything from pesticides to car pollution to nuclear radiation to most municipal tap waters.” ~ David Wolfe
- “Every November, during the certain holiday people love so much, people take a dead turkey, open up the dead turkey’s ass, or carve out a really big hole in their ass, take some stuffing and shove it inside their dead empty ass, and use the little dead ass as an oven to bake some bread. Somebody else’s dead empty bacteria-laden ass to make bread? Ass bread?! And people think vegans are weird? Because we eat tofu? And rice, and beans, and lentils?” ~ Gary Yourofsky
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“Biology will relate every human gene to the genes of other animals and bacteria, to this great chain of being.” ~ Walter Gilbert
- “I think the biggest thing is clean as you go. Wash all your knives, cutting boards, dishes, when you are done cooking, not look at a sink full of dishes after you are done. Cleaning as you go helps keep away cross contamination and you avoid having food borne bacteria.” ~ Cat Cora
- “Salad bars are like a restaurant’s lungs. They soak up the impurities and bacteria in the environment, leaving you with much cleaner air to enjoy.” ~ Douglas Coupland
- “To the eyes of a god, mankind must appear as a species of bacteria which multiply and become progressively virulent whenever they find themselves in a congenial culture, and whose activity diminishes until they disappear completely as soon as proper measures are taken to sterilize them.” ~ Aleister Crowley
- “Proper turkey preparation is critical. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, more Americans die every year from eating improperly cooked turkey than were killed in the entire Peloponnesian War. This is because turkey can contain salmonella, which are tiny bacteria that, if they get in your bloodstream, develop into full-grown salmon, which could come leaping out of your mouth during an important business presentation.” ~ Dave Barry
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“Bacteria mineralized the rocks; they deposited the iron. They made the geology we see.” ~ Bonnie Bassler
- “I think that we reject the evidence that our world is changing because we are still, as that wonderfully wise biologist E. O. Wilson reminded us, tribal carnivores. We are programmed by our inheritance to see other living things as mainly something to eat, and we care more about our national tribe than anything else. We will even give our lives for it and are quite ready to kill other humans in the cruellest of ways for the good of our tribe. We still find alien the concept that we and the rest of life, from bacteria to whales, are parts of the much larger and diverse entity, the living Earth.” ~ James Lovelock
- “[Bacteria] have an incredibly complicated chemical lexicon that … allows bacteria to be multicellular. In the spirit of TED they’re doing things together because it makes a difference.” ~ Bonnie Bassler
- “Back in 1983, the United States government approved the release of the first genetically modified organism. In this case, it was a bacteria that prevents frost on food crops.” ~ Jeremy Rifkin
- “We add that it would be all too easy to object that mutations have no evolutionary effect because they are eliminated by natural selection. Lethal mutations (the worst kind) are effectively eliminated, but others persist as alleles. …Mutants are present within every population, from bacteria to man. There can be no doubt about it. But for the evolutionist, the essential lies elsewhere: in the fact that mutations do not coincide with evolution.” ~ Pierre-Paul Grasse
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“My bacteria glow in the dark – no human being doesn’t like that.” ~ Bonnie Bassler
- “We can, for example, be fairly confident that either there will be a world without war or there won’t be a world – at least, a world inhabited by creatures other than bacteria and beetles, with some scattering of others.” ~ Noam Chomsky
- “One sometimes finds what one is not looking for. When I woke up just after dawn on Sept. 28, 1928, I certainly didn’t plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world’s first antibiotic, or bacteria killer. But I guess that was exactly what I did.” ~ Alexander Fleming
- “Has it ever occurred to you how lucky you are to be alive? More than 99 percent of all the creatures that have ever lived have died without progeny, but not a single one of your ancestors falls into that group! … Not a single one of your ancestors, all the way back to the bacteria, succumbed to predation before reproducing, or lost out in the competition for a mate.” ~ Daniel Dennett
- “Take the entire 4.5-billion-year history of the earth and scale it down to a single year, with January 1 being the origin of the earth and midnight on December 31 being the present. Until June, the only organisms were single-celled microbes, such as algae, bacteria, and amoebae. The first animal with a head did not appear until October. The first human appears on December 31. We, like all the animals and plants that have ever lived, are recent crashers at the party of life on earth.” ~ Neil Shubin
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“[Bacteria are the] dark matter of the biological world [with 4 million mostly unknown species in a ton of soil].” ~ E. O. Wilson
- “It was astonishing that for some considerable distance around the mould growth the staphococcal colonies were undergoing lysis. What had formerly been a well-grown colony was now a faint shadow of its former self…I was sufficiently interested to pursue the subject.” ~ Alexander Fleming
- “Very close cousins like humans and chimps have almost all their genes in common. Slightly less close cousins like humans and monkeys still have recognizably the same genes. You could carry on right on down to humans and bacteria, and you will find continuous compelling evidence for the hierarchical tree of cousinship.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “In the beginning, there were bacteria…. [A] nearly universal assumption is that all subsequent life descended from the original life form through a continuous chain of ancestor-descendant pairs. This assumption looks good because all living organisms share biochemical traits. It is conceivable, of course, that life originated more than once on the early earth but that all except one life form died out early, leaving a single lineage as the ancestor of life as we know it. If this did happen, it was the first important species extinction.” ~ David M. Raup
- “Intelligence is a valuable thing, but it is not usually the key to survival. Sheer fecundity … usually counts. The intelligent gorilla doesn’t do as well as the less intelligent but more-fecund rat, which doesn’t do as well as the still-less-intelligent but still-more-fecund cockroach, which doesn’t do as well as the minimally-intelligent but maximally-fecund bacterium.” ~ Isaac Asimov
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“Happiness and bacteria have one thing in common; they multiply by dividing!” ~ Rutvik Oza
- “When antibiotics became industrially produced following World War II, our quality of life and our longevity improved enormously. No one thought bacteria were going to become resistant.” ~ Bonnie Bassler
- “There’s very little that shocks me because I consider life a miracle so I guess what shocks me is that life exists. How the hell did we get here? What shocks me is that bacteria alter their genes and resist antibiotics and viruses resist vaccines.” ~ Bernie Siegel
- “But however secure and well-regulated civilized life may become, bacteria, Protozoa, viruses, infected fleas, lice, ticks, mosquitoes, and bedbugs will always lurk in the shadows ready to pounce when neglect, poverty, famine, or war lets down the defenses.” ~ Hans Zinsser
- “What we want is another sample of life, which is not on our tree of life at all. All life that we’ve studied so far on Earth belongs to the same tree. We share genes with mushrooms and oak trees and fish and bacteria that live in volcanic vents and so on that it’s all the same life descended from a common origin. What we want is a second tree of life. We want alien life, alien not necessarily in the sense of having come from space, but alien in the sense of belonging to a different tree altogether. That is what we’re looking for, “life 2.0.”” ~ Paul Davies
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“You cannot insert a gene you took from a bacteria into a seed and call it LIFE. You have not created life, instead you have only polluted it.” ~ Vandana Shiva
- “It’s also hard for people to contend with the difficult possibility that we are simply overadvanced fungi and bacteria hurtling through a galaxy in cold, meaningless space. But just because our existence may have arisen unintentionally and without purpose doesn’t preclude meaning or purpose from emerging as a result of our interaction and collaboration. Meaning may not be a precondition for humanity as much as a by-product of it.” ~ Douglas Rushkoff
- “We still think of human disease as the work of an organized, modernized kind of demonology, in which the bacteria are the most visible and centrally placed of our adversaries. We assume that they must somehow relish what they do.” ~ Lewis Thomas
- “Natural selection certainly operates. It explains how bacteria will gain antibiotic resistance; it will explain how insects get insecticide resistance, but it doesn’t explain how you get bacteria or insects in the first place.” ~ William A. Dembski
- “When you’re in the womb, you’re in a sterile environment. When you enter the birth canal and the world, you’re not. Very quickly, you have, living on the surface of your body, trillions of bacteria, literally trillion.” ~ Paul A. Offit
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“One bacterium has 2,000 to 6,000 proteins.” ~ Paul A. Offit
- “Biocides, for example, are designed to kill bacteria—it’s not a benign material.” ~ William Stringfellow
- “However, on many occasions, I examined normal blood and normal tissues and there was no possibility of overlooking bacteria or confusing them with granular masses of equal size. I never found organisms. Thus, I conclude that bacteria do not occur in healthy human or animal tissues.” ~ Robert Koch
- “It has occurred to me that possibly the white corpuscles may have the office of picking up and digesting bacterial organisms when by any means they find their way into the blood. The propensity exhibited by the leukocytes for picking up inorganic granules is well known, and that they may be able not only to pick up but to assimilate, and so dispose of, the bacteria which come in their way does not seem to me very improbable in view of the fact that amoebae, which resemble them so closely, feed upon bacteria and similar organisms.” ~ George Miller Sternberg
- “Everyone is trying to jump on the biomimic bandwagon. But a cork floor is not biomimicry. Neither is using bacteria to clean water.” ~ Janine Benyus
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“Family was a fertile breeding ground for the kind of psychological bacteria that warped minds and devoured hope.” ~ Tami Hoag
- “Perhaps bacteria may tentatively be regarded as biochemical experiments; owing to their relatively small size and rapid growth, variations must arise much more frequently than in more differentiated forms of life, and they can in addition afford to occupy more precarious positions in natural economy than larger organisms with more exacting requirements.” ~ Marjory Stephenson
- “When it comes to taking genes from viruses and bacteria and putting them into plants, people say ‘Yuck! Why would scientists do that?’ Because sometimes it is the safest, cheapest and most effective technology to advance sustainable agriculture and enhance food security.” ~ Pamela Ronald
- “[In research on bacteria metabolism] we have indeed much the same position as an observer trying to gain an idea of the life of a household by careful scrutiny of the persons and material arriving or leaving the house; we keep accurate records of the foods and commodities left at the door and patiently examine the contents of the dust-bin and endeavour to deduce from such data the events occurring within the closed doors.” ~ Marjory Stephenson
- “There is no significant difference between human activities and those by amoebas and even bacteria, well, on the GRAND SCALE.” ~ Mikhail Leonidovich Gromov
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“I wish, I wish I were a poisonous bacterium.” ~ Dorothy Parker
- “Without birds to feed on them, the insects would multiply catastrophically. The insects, not man or other proud species, are really the only ones fitted for survival in the nuclear age. The cockroach, a venerable and hardy species, will take over the habitats of the foolish humans, and compete only with other insects or bacteria.” ~ H. Bentley Glass
- “Take pandemics. There could easily be a severe pandemic. A lot of that comes from something we don’t pay much attention to: Eating meat. The meat production industry, the industrial production of meat, uses an immense amount of antibiotics.We’re now running out of antibiotics that deal with the threat of rapidly mutating bacteria. A lot of that just comes from the meat production industry. Well, do we worry about it? Well, we ought to be.” ~ Noam Chomsky
- “I would have bacteria and, yeah, it would grow in what we call the danger zone, which is typically between 40 and 140. But if I’m getting something out of my refrigerator where it’s been basically pretty clean and I’m putting it on my counter, what exactly is going to happen in that amount of time that going into a hot oven isn’t going to kill? Nothing.” ~ Alton Brown
- “The aquifer [is] the water table people need to keep secure. Nature has this incredible system of water purification under the ground. Ground water is much better to drink than surface water because it filters out the bacteria that can cause all sorts of problems.” ~ Josh Fox
- “We are beginning to shift into life code. And in the process of shifting into life code, every life form on this planet is coded in a double helix with a sugar phosphate backbone. And that codes whether you become a bacteria, an orange, a lemon, a Lemur, a Cow, a sheep, a human being, a politician, any one of these things is all coded in this four-letter code.” ~ Juan Enriquez
